Betty came to the city without a job or a place of her own. Against all her motherly caution she moved to the city and slept with the children on the floor of her third cousin’s Southside apartment, three to a single mattress, the apartment always damp with dish- and bathwater. When the school year was drawing to a close, without a steady job, and against her own better judgment, certain that she risked being outside come winter, she jumped at the chance to sign into the no-numbered house at the corner of Third Avenue and Franklin. She lied to Mr. Rojta, her landlord, and moved in. For the first time she laid aside the quiet shield of indifference Indians usually present to whites with power, money, or both, and out-and-out lied. Said, Yes, I have a job. He looked skeptical until she produced the money she had made from selling off the log cabin Jacob had built to a fisherman from Iowa, $120 in twenties, kept in Jacob’s old discharge papers envelope.

Forgotten by the love-struck government, lying through her teeth and grinding down her own misgivings, she moved in, got the children settled, and looked for work. She washed clothes, scrubbed floors, cooked briefly at one of the few Indian-owned cafés on Franklin, and did whatever she could to get by. Her cousins asked her how she was doing. Getting by, she’d say. How? Got some here and there, gettin a little some everywhere. She dodged the question, because she had made rent arrangements that would have sent her dead husband into a killing rage. Out of respect for him she told no one what she did to make ends meet. Jacob had killed, but rage was something he had never allowed himself while alive, and because of that, she suffered in silence. Her cousin’s friend, Ester, a black woman who lived on the Southside with her twin daughters, who not only liked Indians, but had married one—an Oneida who died soon after falling into the hog wires of a crane—told Betty that they were always looking for work at the hospital.

“What about the sick people? All those sick people give me the creeps.”

“You don’t got to look at them, honey. Not face or ass. There’s lots else to do.”

Betty shuddered, partly from remembering the smell of the IHS clinic and partly from the sting of the perm that Ester was giving her. The clinic always made her sick, filled with the smell of rotting flesh from diabetics and the phlegmy air of the TB ward where the sick were wheeled onto the porch to breathe clean northern air which they could neither taste nor draw properly anymore.

“I don’t know,” said Betty, fidgeting in the kitchen chair.

“With an attitude like that, baby, your kids gonna end up there pretty soon anyway.”